Quotes on Reading

If we can put a man on the moon and sequence the human genome, we should be able to devise something close to a universal digital public library.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

It is possible, reading standard histories, to forget half the population of the country. The explorers were men, the landholders and merchants men, the political leaders men, the military figures men. The very invisibility of women, the overlooking of women, is a sign of their submerged status.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers.

Commit to paper precisely what you would like to have appear in your physical life. By seeing it and reading it repeatedly, you will plant that thought more firmly in your mind and you will begin to manifest that which you are imaging.

Listening to my songs is like reading my diary.

The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.

There is something so deeply visceral about libraries for me-rooms and rooms full of people dreaming and remembering.

There are few professing Christians, it may be feared, who strive to imitate Christ in the matter of private devotion. There is abundance of hearing, reading, talking, professing, visiting, contributing to the poor and teaching at schools. But is there, together with all this, a due proportion of private prayer? Are believing men and women sufficiently careful to be frequently alone with God?

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends.

A broader reading of history shows that appeasement, no matter how it is labeled, never fulfills the hopes of the appeasers.

Little learning and much pride come of hasty reading.

You must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.

It is important early in life to acquire the power of reading sense wherever you happen to be.

Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had. And when you are reading a book, you and the author are alone together-just the two of you.

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions.

Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.

There's no better reading experience than going to the place where a text was written.

For a person who grew up in the '30s and '40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, 'Here I am, read me.' Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.